Beneath the Hall, a Baseball Vault Full of Treasures

Beneath the National Baseball Hall of Fame is the hall of fame that few will ever see: the climate-controlled storage rooms where tens of thousands of artifacts — caps, uniforms, gloves, bats, trading cards, bobblehead dolls, documents and scrapbooks — are kept.

It is baseball’s attic, so to speak, a vast (not noticeably dusty) collection of the significant and the ephemeral, some of which move in and out of exhibits, like one about Yankees history recently displayed at the All-Star FanFest.

“I tell people this is not the vault where we keep all the good stuff so nobody can see it,” said Tom Shieber, the hall’s senior curator, who joined the museum after spending the earlier part of his career in solar physics.

“My job is to tell baseball stories,” Shieber said as he opened a box of ancient season passes, all made of metal, like one from 1902 that is etched with the ornate Roman design of Cincinnati’s Palace of the Fans ballpark and another in the form of a pocketknife required to enter the Polo Grounds in 1913.

A volume of Eleanor Gehrig’s scrapbook was opened. An article about her wedding was headlined: “Lou Gehrig Weds!” A telegram from Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees’ owner, read: “Heartiest congratulations.” The hall also has the prop scrapbook used by cinema’s Eleanor, Teresa Wright, in “The Pride of the Yankees.”

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Ron Guidry, the Yankees’ great left-hander, and his wife, Bonnie, watched as each page of the preserved scrapbook was turned. They were on a tour led by Shieber early Sunday morning before the induction of Guidry’s friend and former Yankees teammate Goose Gossage.

Before a game in 1979, Guidry recalled that Eleanor Gehrig had visited the Yankees dugout. “She said to me, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the little left-hander,’ ” Guidry recalled her saying. “ ‘You know, I think Lou would have had a challenge hitting off you.’ I didn’t even think she knew who I was.”

The mobile shelves inside the collections storage room — where employees and visitors must wear white gloves — contain box after box of artifacts. Gray boxes with uniforms are stacked one atop another.

Photo

The Hall of Famer Hank Aaron photographing relatives in front of the halls plaques, one of the museums permanent displays.Credit
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

Clemente, Cobb and Clemens.

Gamble, Gehrig and Gehringer.

Vander Meer, Vaughan and Wagner (Honus, not Leon).

Shieber removes a Wagner box from a shelf and pulls away the tissue paper: it is Wagner’s jersey from his time in 1896 and 1897 with the minor league Paterson team in New Jersey. It has Paterson written in red letters, red piping on the collar and sleeves, and blue pinstripes.

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More blue pinstripes adorned the item with the tag No. B-13-48A, the 13th item on the hall’s collections ledger of 1948: a Babe Ruth flannel home jersey, with thick blue pinstripes, but no interlocking NY.

“Our pinstripes were thinner,” Guidry said as he held up the textile relic so Bonnie could photograph him with it. “And ours was much more comfortable.”

Shieber offered another part of Yankees apparel history, a cap worn by two Highlanders (the pre-Yankees) that looks small enough for a young boy. Once white, it now bears yellow sweat stains. The blue peak protrudes a little; the look is more beanie than stately Yankees headgear.

It was donated in 1990 by Paul Otis, whose major league career consisted of four games with the Highlanders in 1912. He hit .059. He signed his name in dark ink (his given name was Bill), but Shieber thinks he inscribed the cap in 1990, when he was 100, not when he wore it.

Inside the cap, under the sweatband, was another outfielder’s name: Cozy Dolan. Is that a problem? Two players? Shieber’s sensible theory is that “Dolan wore it, returned it and then Otis wore it.” Records show the Highlanders sold Dolan to Rochester in May that year, so maybe someone else, lost to the provenance of the cap, also wore it.

Shieber said that Dolan, who batted .200 in 18 games with the Highlanders in 1912, almost certainly wore the cap at the first opening day at Fenway Park, on April 20, 1912, when Tris Speaker drove in the winning run for Boston in the 11th inning.

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Guidry soon left for a signing, but Bonnie continued on the tour. Shieber told her that when he assembled the Yankees exhibit for the FanFest, he had nothing (save for photographs) of her husband’s career that would have helped illustrate his amazing 1978 season (25-3, 1.74 earned run average, 248 strikeouts).

“Like his holey jersey and his holey undershirt that he wore every start?” she said. (Such are the moments curators like Shieber wait for.)

“I’ll send you something,” she said.

Correction: July 30, 2008

The Sports Business column on Tuesday, about the treasures stored beneath the National Baseball Hall of Fame, misstated the title of Tom Shieber, a Hall employee. He is the senior curator  not the chief curator, the position held by Ted Spencer.

E-mail: sportbiz@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Beneath the Hall, a Vault Full of Treasures. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe